The Engineering Book: From the Catapult to the Curiosity Rover: 250 Milestones in the History of Engineering

1903

The Wright Brothers’ Airplane

Wilbur Wright (1867–1912), Orville Wright (1871–1948)

Airplanes are so familiar today that it’s hard to imagine life without them. But at the start of the twentieth century, there was not a single airplane in existence. Many believed that humans would never fly.

The Wright brothers made the dream of flight a reality in North Carolina in 1903. They certainly were engineers, but they were also scientists and inventors. There were so many problems and fundamental questions that they needed to resolve: How to create lift? How to generate sufficient thrust? How to control flight? How to make the plane light enough? How to combine it all together?

For example, they built a wind tunnel and did fundamental research to discover wing shapes that provided maximum lift. Then they had to render those shapes as strong, lightweight structures—the bi-wing arrangement of the original Wright flyer using wood, fabric, and wire. Then they had to bend those structures during flight to control the plane. We look at their solution today as slightly bizarre—the entire wing warped, and they controlled warping with their hips. We consider their forward-mounted control surfaces to be strange as well. That’s because the Wright Brothers started with a blank sheet of paper, with everything unprecedented and unknown. The conventions of rudder, elevator, and ailerons would evolve quickly once the brothers unlocked the core secrets of flight.

The entire aircraft weighed 605 pounds (275 kg) empty. How to get it off the ground? The engine seems primitive by today’s standards. At 200 cubic inches (3.3 liters) and roughly 200 pounds (91 kg), it produced just 12 horsepower (9,000 watts). A small pan of gasoline in the engine’s air intake served as a carburetor, contact breakers in the cylinders created the spark, and evaporating water cooled the engine. A man named Charles Taylor built it from scratch from a three-way dialog with the brothers. But it reliably produced its 12 horsepower to spin two counter-rotating, hand-carved wooden propellers.

It seems nearly impossible that three people could bring so many ideas and engineering disciplines together to create a flying machine that worked. Inspiration, curiosity, persistence, and the thrill of discovery powered them through.

Pictured: The first sustained flight of the Wright Brothers’ airplane.